Social network traffic – maybe not declining after all

Last week I wrote about Forbes reporting declining social network traffic.

In the comments some of you said that traffic to niche social network sites is increasing – and this is certainly something we are seeing at WAYN (DFJ Esprit portfolio company), where monthly unique visitors this month will be up circa 185% on a year ago at around 6.3m. All the other metrics there are moving in the right direction as well, total hits, page views, photos uploaded, comments on photos etc. and many of them with higher growth rates than the 185% figure for uniques.

And finally my partner Cedric pointed me to a Telefonica Tumblelog (dont’ know if this is anything to do with Telefonica??) with the following stats which cast doubt on whether Facebook is going backwards:

25m users, growing 3% per week, which is 100,000 new users per day
(up from 7.5m users in July 2007), projected to reach 50m by end of
2007

The fastest growing demographic is the 25 and over age group

1% of all time spent on the internet is facebook

50% of registered users come back to the site every day.

60 billion page views per month, 50 pages per user every day

6th most trafficked site in the U.S

1 bn photos hosted on the site, 6m uploaded each deay, 70k photos
served per second, making facebook the biggest photo sharing site on
the web

1-2 m people are on facebook simultaneously at any one time

$100m per year advertising deal with Microsoft

Internal valuation of $8bn, based on projected revenues of $1bn p.a. by 2015

Unfortunately these are not sourced. That said there is a good degree of overlap with the offical Facebook stats.

To try and sum up this contradictory picture, I guess it looks likely that niche networks as a category are growing, and we will have to wait for more data to know about the big guys.